Bizarre Wicker Park: Beer Barons, Medicine and Mobsters Walking Tour

Wicker Park is one of Chicago’s most celebrated neighborhoods, but its polished reputation sits on top of a genuinely strange past.

On this walking tour, you’ll follow the neighborhood’s arc from labor radicalism and quack medicine to mob intrigue, hearing the stories of the outsized characters who shaped it.

The tour starts at Wicker Park itself – a green space that, as you’ll discover, shouldn’t actually bear that name. You’ll head along Schiller Street to “Beer Baron’s Row,” where grand Victorian mansions tell stories of wealth, tragedy, and murder. You’ll learn how redlining and a grassroots preservation campaign saved these architectural showpieces from demolition, and how the neighborhood’s early inhabitants continue to influence the city today.

On North Avenue, you’ll find out about the neighborhood’s commercial and artistic history through some of its most compelling characters. The tour ends at the corner of North Avenue and Elk Grove Avenue, a block away from where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was planned – and where its getaway car was eventually destroyed.

On this 45-minute tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Learn why labor leader Lucy Parsons was considered more dangerous than a thousand rioters – and what happened to her books after she died
• Hear how a murder-suicide at the Rapp Mansion left its owner’s wife slowly “driven insane”
• Visit Wicker Park Lutheran Church, built with bricks salvaged from a very surprising source
• Discover how Theophilus Noel’s mail order cure-all funded the neighborhood’s first skyscraper
• Find out why a mob boss held meetings in the steam room of the North Avenue Russian Baths
• Spot a WWI howitzer in a front yard – and learn why a judge ordered the return of slot machines seized there by police

This tour covers stories you won’t find in any guidebook, expertly told by a long-time resident, and it’ll permanently change how you see Wicker Park’s elegant streets.